Normally when there's a debate over media ethics, I go old school. After all, journalistic standards are being chipped away all the time. Some folks in our profession don't understand basic principles like identifying their conflicts of interest or attributing all quotes to a real human being.

But when it comes to the sniping over media speculation about Malaysian Flight 370, I side with the speculators.

Why? Because this is an honest-to-goodness real-life mystery, the kind of thing that is simply not supposed to happen in our highly advanced society. Why, the very idea of a gigantic jet filled with hundreds of people simply vanishing seems like science fiction. Until it actually happened.

As such, it is only natural for journalists to wonder - in print, on the web, on radio and on TV - about what occurred, and when and why. This is, in fact, what the public is doing. If the news media wasn't reflecting that intense, unending curiosity, it wouldn't be doing its job. And frankly, compared to the Kardashian-saturated nonsense that infests many media outlets these days, the Flight 370 speculation was like reading a science textbook.

Was some of the media speculation over the top, or downright ridiculous? Of course it was. Exhibit A would be CNN's Don Lemon wondering if the plane had been swallowed by a black hole.

Uh, Don, you might have wanted to run that question by your science advisers. As one of his guests tactfully pointed out, if a black hole did someone exist near the plane, it would have swallowed the aircraft ... and everything else in our solar system.

Really, the only way to sort through the various theories was to hash them out and debate the pros and cons. And the fascinating thing about this mystery is that there were three or four plausible scenarios - and, ironically, good reasons why each one might not work.

I suspect that few people with free time didn't dip their toe in this water - or plunge right in for a full bath. Honestly, you would have to be a pretty boring person not to care about one of the biggest legitimate mysteries to come along in decades.

If you were one of those people, I'd hate to be seated next to you on a cramped passenger jet for a three-hour flight. Unless I wanted to sleep, and you let me.

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Thomas Taschinger, TTaschinger@BeaumontEnterprise.com, is the editorial page editor of The Beaumont Enterprise. Follow him on Twitter at @PoliticalTom